Convert Emoji UTF8 to Unicode in Powershell - powershell

Question

I need to persist data in a database with powershell. Occasionally the data contains an emoji.
DB: On the DB side everything should be fine. The attributes are set to NVARCHAR which makes it possible to persist emojis. When I inserted the data manually the emoji got displayed after I query them(🤝💰).
I tested it with example data in SSMS and it worked perfectly.
Powershell: When preparing the SQL Statement in Powershell I noticed that the emojis are interpreted in UTF8 (ðŸ¤ðŸ’°). Basically gibberish.
Is a conversion from UTF8 to Unicode even necessary? How can I persist the emojis as 🤝💰 and not as ðŸ¤ðŸ’°/1f600

Answer 1

My colleague had the correct answer to this problem.
To persist emojis in a MS SQL Database you need to declare the column as nvarchar(max) (max is not necessarily), which I already did.
I tried to persist example data which I had hardcoded in my PS Script like this
#{ description = "Example Description😊😊 }
Apparently VS Code adds some kind of encoding on top of the data(our guess).
What basically solved the issue was simply requesting the data from the API and persist it into the database with prefix string literal with N + the nvarchar(max) column datatype
Example:
SET #displayNameFormatted = N'"+$displayName+"'
And then include that variable in my insert statement.

Answer 2

Does this answer your question? "Use NVARCHAR(size) datatype and prefix string literal with N:"
Add emoji / emoticon to SQL Server table
1 Emoji in powershell is 2 utf16 surrogate characters, since the code for it is too high for 16 bits. Surrogates and Supplementary Characters
'🤝'.length
2
Microsoft has made "unicode" a confusing term, since that's what they call utf16 le encoding.
Powershell 5.1 doesn't recognize utf8 no bom encoded scripts automatically.
We don't know what your commandline actually is, but see also: Unicode support for Invoke-Sqlcmd in PowerShell